We keep fish. We’ve had them for a couple of years now.

In terms of keeping pets, fish are probably the easiest, quietest, cheapest (cheap to buy that is, it does cost a bit to set up your tank initially) and least messy. So often I forget we even have “pets”.

It’s great for the kids learning about the fish, watching them eat, how they interact with each other (some fish are territorial and aggressive), behaviours and also learning about life and death (yes fish die and often too). It’s actually been a good lesson when their favourite fish dies and has been opportunity to talk about it openly. In fact we had a beta fish (or Siamese fighting fish) that died last year and I was quite upset about it, he was sick for a day and I kept going in to check on him it really affected me more than I thought it would.

We’ve just added a recent addition to one of our tanks, a blue yabby. We’ve called him “Bluey”.

Being this is the first time we’ve had a yabby it’s given us the opportunity to read up about them.  We’ve found out a few interesting facts about yabbies like the fact that they like to eat carrots and they’re apparently very good escape artists.

The latest amazing thing that has happened is he moulted or shead his outer layer.

There are so many varieties of fish and we’ve had a lot of the tropical varieties that are available.

The kids have really enjoyed looking and learning about the fish and so many ‘lessons’ have been learned purely by observation.
What about your family, what pets do you keep?